We sit on the buyer's side of every robotics decision

I'm Dean Fankhauser. I've spent the last fifteen years building marketplaces in fragmented industries where buyers lack the information and access to make confident decisions.

The pattern is always the same. A market has dozens or hundreds of suppliers, pricing is opaque, quality varies wildly, and buyers end up making expensive decisions based on whoever had the best sales deck or the loudest booth at the trade show. The information asymmetry between vendors and buyers is enormous — and it costs real money.

I co-founded Nuji, a product discovery marketplace that aggregated 5 million items from 10,000 retailers. It reached profitability, scaled to $19M in gross annual sales, and was acquired by Klarna. Before that, I held senior roles at Santander, Yahoo, and Havas — working at the intersection of technology, commerce, and consumer decision-making.

I then built Movingto, an immigration advisory that has guided over 2,500 families through Golden Visa and relocation processes across Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Same problem, different market: fragmented suppliers, opaque pricing, buyers who could not get straight answers. Same solution: an independent advisory layer that sits on the buyer's side.

Robotics is the most extreme version of this problem I have seen. A VP of Operations considering automation faces 50+ manufacturers, pricing that varies by multiples, conflicting vendor claims, and no record of what actually changed between the demo and the quote. Most buyers I talk to have spent months researching and still cannot tell whether a price or an availability claim from six months ago still holds. That is the gap RoboZaps was built to close.

Not as a marketplace. Not as a vendor. A record of what's actually changing in robotics, verified, with the evidence.